On 17 January 1778, Mozart wrote to his father “Now for another subject. Last Wednesday there was a great feast to which I was also invited. There were fifteen guests, and the young lady of the house was to play

J.R.R. Tolkien created an entire world of high fantasy in his work The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Creating the world of Middle Earth beginning with The Hobbit in 1937, he fleshed it out in the three volumes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his mother on 14 January 1775, “God be praised! My opera was given yesterday, the 13th, and proved so successful that I cannot possibly describe all the tumult. In the first place, the whole theatre

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the genre-changing 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll, takes us to a world populated by talking animals who pose questions of logic and behave in ways that make 7-year-old Alice question the sanity of it all. Characters

In my humble opinion, the richness and subtlety of Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) melodic and harmonic language is unequaled in the world of classical music. For one reason or another, we are led to believe that Schubert’s music was not popular

The emergence of the new media of television, cinema and radio in the 20th century brought Scheherazade into the mainstream of popular culture. Hollywood went into overdrive, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed of 1926, is the oldest surviving feature-length

On 3 January 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his father from Munich, “My head and my hands are so fully occupied with my third act, that it would not be wonderful if I turned into a third act myself, for

Composers are inspired by the world, by their experiences, and by others’ imaginations. Novels and stories have been set by composers as everything from little piano pieces (here, Debussy was inspired by the Golliwog character in children’s book by Florence